The Blondes (20 page)

There was also an email from Karl, and I left this one until last. He wrote that he had only just realized I might have been caught in “that madness at the airport.” He was quite emotional and signed off
Love, Karl
, but I noted how the email had come a full week after I’d been expected home. I considered writing back, but when I looked into the bottom of my cappuccino cup, I found only foam.

I didn’t know then that this would be our last correspondence: love from Karl; and from me, silence.

New York’s cineplexes got shut down, which is how I found myself the following day in an artist’s warehouse space in Williamsburg for a showing of three films layered overtop of one another—three versions of
King Kong
playing at once. The artist was French, from Paris; her name was Camille Henrot. It all added up to layers of ghost, blonde and beast, city and jungle. I watched cars driving through close-ups of faces. I had always felt an overpowering empathy with the beast: I
was
Kong.
The King Kong Addition
, it was called. It made me imagine art as an equation—an addition and subtraction of empathy, understanding, what the viewer brings to a cultural work just by being present. I’d thought the filmmaker would be there and I wanted to ask her about her interest in icons and if she could tell us what was happening with the plague in France, whether it was impacting her current work. But she wasn’t there,
or perhaps I’d got that part wrong. When I asked the couple sitting next to me about this, they told me the King Kong work was several years old and had been sent over for a single screening, without the filmmaker.

Watching those beautiful blonde actresses—Naomi Watts layered over Jessica Lange layered over Fay Wray—I thought of Karl’s face. It was a man’s face, but it was also a face full of clouds. I had seen him fully naked only twice. Once at my apartment, and once here at the cottage. It hurts if I think of it too much. My favourite part was the place where his hip bone jutted against his skin—that, and the divot at the base of his knotty throat. Ours wasn’t much of a relationship, but it was mine. Karl was the kind of man who would walk out into a storm thinking he could beat it, then find out later he’d been skirting a tornado just twenty miles north and was lucky all he’d got was drenched. He made you feel fiercely protective of him. Maybe that was also why I hadn’t told him about you; maybe the hesitation wasn’t just my anger. The clinic hadn’t phoned that Tuesday when they’d said they would. When I’d checked their website there was a message across the homepage saying they were very sorry but the city had stepped in and shut them down “due to gyno-threat.” I squinted at the movie screen and tried to see only one layer. I swallowed down my queasiness. I concentrated on Fay Wray.

When I walked out of the art space, afternoon sunlight dazzled me. The couple who had been sitting next to me on folding chairs began to bicker on the sidewalk about where to get dinner; they were thirtysomethings and were similar in
their manners, hairstyles and dress—masculine/feminine versions of each other. One was tugging on his blazer and the other was trading spectacles for prescription sunglasses. They looked like worn-in shoes, turned toward each other, creased and faded. I envied them their choices. Putting my hand along the ridge of my glasses, I shielded my watering eyes.

It was time to go home and face Karl. I planned to fly out of New York again—or attempt to—and Larissa said she could pick me up. “But it’s going to be hard.”

I thought at first that she meant hard on her—geographically, schedule-wise, or maybe even emotionally—since she’d been stuck at the Toronto airport waiting for me when the JFK disaster was announced. I told her I’d get a commuter flight at a reasonable time so she could get Dev from daycare on her way from her job at the gallery.

But she said to hang on, and she covered the phone again. In the background I could hear the cadence of Jay’s voice.

She said distinctly, as if her hand had slipped from the mouthpiece, “I’m not going to tell her that,” and then after another moment, to me, “Uh-huh, Jaichand says to rent a car and drive if you haven’t bought your ticket. Or even if you have. Don’t fly. You’ll be lucky to get in.” She said the military was running the airport now. “Jay read that they’ll definitely make you do a carpet-and-drapes test.” She was always flipping back and forth between Jaichand’s real name, and his nickname, Jay.

“A what?”

“Apparently they’re making women show their pubic hair.”

“That’s so … wrong.”

“I know! They say they have to be able to assess your risk level before they let you into the country.” There was a dull flick-flick in the background.

“You didn’t start smoking again?”

Larissa sighed. “My son still doesn’t know me. He says I’m not his mom.”

Remembering Kovacs, I told her to get a wig. She could find a good one if she was willing to pay for it.

“It’s not just because of the hair, it’s I’ve been crying a lot. Dev’s a little kid, he’s confused by strong emotions in adults. He’s just not used to them.”

“What’s going on, Lar?”

This launched her into a prepackaged panic. She said she could tell I was only reading American news. I’d thought I’d been following along pretty well, but she commanded me to read the CBC and BBC websites. “It’s really intense. They’re predicting a ten percent population drop in Europe if things continue. International travel is one of the main ways the disease is spread: we’re such globetrotters these days. Scientists say it originated with fleas, possibly in California or Florida—”

“I know that. I thought the Netherlands—”

“Regardless,” Larissa insisted, and I could hear her dragging on the cigarette, “the main point is that they
don’t know
how it’s reacting with melanin. I mean, what do fleas and melanin have to do with each other? I’m with the Flea
Vector Denialists on this one. Really, they have no handle on this. Yes, we can shave, we can wear wigs, but you think they know what’s happening? They don’t. They have
theories
, that’s all. New York is teeming with cases—they say because of its population and because it’s a hub for the rest of the country, travel-wise. There are cases here in Toronto, but mostly they’re trying to keep it out. Today there was a headline proclaiming ‘The Blonde Death.’ ”

“That’s terrible.”

“Everything is.” There was a quaver in Larissa’s voice.

“You don’t have to pick me up. I’ll see about renting a car and driving through Buffalo,” I told her resolutely. I clicked off and lay on the bed with the phone, staring at it. Larissa and Jay had married at city hall to avoid a large wedding while she was pregnant; she was my first married friend, and this had made her seem instantly ten years older than me instead of one. She and Jay lived in a condo building with advertising on the side, a bank ad proclaiming that we all had more money than we thought we did. The development was positioned strategically with access to the expressway, a view of the CN Tower, and a short walk to the St. Lawrence Market. They had a beautiful child, and beautiful clothes, and a small but beautiful living space with colourful, delicate things inside it made of glass, paper, and hard plastic.

All week, for a living, Larissa made phone calls and sent emails to international donors. She wrote grant applications explaining why the work done by her gallery was making an important contribution to the country’s cultural environment
and exactly how the gallery engaged the public in diverse ways. She had pretended to be an artist throughout her youth, and had become an administrator. She didn’t need the income really, but chose to work anyway. On the advice of lifestyle magazines, she spent money on what she called “experiential investments” for herself and Jay and Devang—activities, classes, shows, restaurants, travel. Sometimes she paid for me, and I protested only a little. She kept a Full Life Diary with special sections earmarked for
Health, Relationships, Meaningful Work, Recreation, Spirituality
, and
Personal Goals
. She had worn various Indian camisas and pyjamas throughout her pregnancy and looked radiant. She had learned to cook curries so that Jay wouldn’t have to make his own lunches. She became good at them, the way she was good at almost everything she put her mind to.

Every day Jaichand aimed an extensible light into people’s faces and watched them squint and open their mouths like babies. He put a mirror inside them and looked for barely visible holes. Sometimes, if he used gas, people disclosed things they wouldn’t otherwise. He did root canals and put crowns in for businessmen who confided they had piercings or tattoos in unseen places, and for condo wives who confided they were having virtual affairs. He took wax between his gloved fingers, positioned it between their molars, and said, “Bite down.”

Jay made jokes about these things at parties. Larissa made jokes about how landing a dentist was a better deal than landing a doctor. Neither of them meant these remarks; both of them meant them.

I’d first met Jay at a party just like that. I had been flipping through a fashion magazine on our host’s coffee table because I was never good at small talk. I stopped at an ad spread for Fructis shampoo. It wasn’t the image but the slogan that caught me:
No one makes your hair stronger
. I thought the personification was interesting,
no one
not
nothing
. As if the product were your best friend. Or maybe a higher power.

“The word
shampoo
comes from India. It’s Hindi,” Jaichand told me. He told me shampooing had originally meant a scalp massage with oils, and when it caught on in Britain, the word eventually evolved to include washing with soap-flecked water and herbs. I’d known the first marketed shampoos had surfaced around the turn of the century, but hadn’t known this. I asked him how he’d come upon this nugget, and he said, “Don’t I look wise?” and mugged a face as serious as a mountain. Jay knew a lot of obscure facts that had nothing to do with dentistry.

I was the person who introduced him to Larissa when a little group of us went to see a movie. It was shortly after I’d first moved to Toronto and Larissa and I were figuring out how to be friends again, grown friends, friends in the same city as opposed to high school friends. We’d been away from each other during our undergrad years. Now we were friends who didn’t tell each other about our sex lives, friends who didn’t admit to feeling crazy or depressed. Instead we called each other up and complained about public transit; we had brunch or went to dinner together at restaurants; we caught a concert or an art show together. By the end of the movie night, Larissa and Jay had swapped email addresses. At first I thought she was interested in
him because she thought I liked him. I
did
like him, but not romantically—the idea was ludicrous. Men like Jaichand—good-looking, accomplished, well-off, intelligent, funny, sexy men—were not interested in me. It made me uncomfortable to think about both ideas: the idea that he might be, or might have been, interested; and the idea that she might be interested in him as a way to best me.

But now, I think Larissa took my introduction as a recommendation. Like a letter of reference: he came through me, and she trusted my opinion. It wasn’t love at first sight, but they fit together. They got married quickly. And she got pregnant even more quickly. Some people might have said she was trying to “land” him, but I wouldn’t say that. Larissa came from a better home than I did—her dad worked at Windsor City Hall. She had gone to a rich high school, and she was smart; even when she slacked off she still made honour roll. Larissa could have had anyone she wanted. She didn’t need to “land” anyone.

The first time I saw Larissa she was sixteen and sitting on the bumper of a car, under a street light in a parking lot down by the Detroit River. She was wearing a blue-and-white sundress, very Shaman Shack, this fair-trade store in downtown Windsor that I always walked past but, at fifteen, hadn’t worked up the courage to go into yet. It was just after sunset, but not that dark yet. Dusk. The July long weekend. Detroit and Windsor always partnered for Fourth of July/Canada Day fireworks.

I was in a foul mood because my mom hadn’t let me ride my bike downtown to the Freedom Festival. My mom was dating Pete then. He came between Gary and Ray—and all of this was years before Richard. Pete wore an open golf collar even though his chest hairs were grey; he wasn’t that much older than Mom, maybe forty-five, but he had a lot of grey curly hair, which seemed to be everywhere on him, like soot.

There was nothing my mother liked better than a man with a suntan and shining silver hair. Although her steady customers were mostly women from the neighbourhood, she had one male customer who insisted on dying his hair. I remember my mom would Scotch-tape a bit of the grey fringe around the front down to this customer’s cheeks and forehead, dye the rest hawk brown, and then flip the silver strands backward overtop for a “natural” look. It was about as natural as drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. The guy looked like he had walked out of the 1970s and into the 1990s.

Pete’s hair was almost all grey—no dye for him. Mom really liked Pete—she said he was built, which maybe he was for an old guy. He had his own place and sold used lawn mowers from a lot out near the racetrack. I didn’t care one way or the other about him. When I was leaving the house after her command not to ride my bike to the festival—“You know there’ll be drunk Americans out driving tonight”—I must have given my mom a sour look, because suddenly Pete wanted to be my buddy.

“Wait, gotcha somethin’.”

He went to his gym bag, which meant he was planning to
stay over, and pulled out a single roman candle. He handed it to me, along with a black plastic lighter with the words
Johnnie Walker
on it and an image of a man in boots with a top hat inked on the side.

I took the objects tentatively.

“That there’s a collector’s item,” Pete said of the lighter. And, “Don’t set anything on fire.” He opened his wallet and handed me ten bucks.

Later I was wandering up and down the river, between families with lawn chairs and teenagers who were half-corked. I was holding the roman candle in my hand, trying to decide if I would set it off, and whether I was going to stay out.